Editorials: Old What's-His-Name/The Meaning of Life
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS Old What's-His-Name by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T his month I vow not to write one word of disparagement against the man whom Paula Corbin Jones has accused of what we moderns call...
...Over the next few weeks," the Sunday Telegraph predicts, "the activities of Lasater—and, by association, Thomasson—are likely to come under close scrutiny in Washington...
...It is not too late to become educated...
...Then the wheeler-dealers began expanding their sham universities...
...Now Ms...
...And the angry posters announcing rape counseling, seminars for ontological bliss, and various councils of war convened for students dividedalong ethnic, sexual, and racial lines, did not put me in mind of the University of Heidelberg or any place Socrates had ever been...
...These can be years of gaiety and learning...
...Senator Alphonse D'Amato, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, intends to investigate the cozy way in which underwriting business for $660 million in state bonds was steered to Lasater & Co...
...So all true Christians better cut it out...
...They have wasted only a year or two...
...His wife, Hillary, has in Vanity Fair questioned the Christian bona fides of her husband's critics ("I find it impossible to believe that people who call themselves Christians could engage in such behavior...
...Lasater's troubles and throughout the 1980s Patsy Thomasson was his "deputy and confidante," according to the Sunday Telegraph...
...I am told that intellectual curiosity is frequently heightened by four years of exposure to multiculturalism and political correctitude...
...As he told ABC News, he is a man who has "sinned as a child of God, who has sought forgiveness, searched for redemption and is struggling to grow and to find the guidance of God in this job...
...As for Paula Corbin Jones's sexual allegations against this president—whom I shall not name—I agree with the White House...
...I was...
...Let's face it, American universities today are what high schools once were, except that those high schools never endangered one's life or sanity...
...During Mr...
...At any rate, the notion of commencement from college into adulthood is an old-fashioned idea—touching but obsolete...
...The owner of Lasater & Co., according to the Sunday Telegraph, "was the biggest contributor to the Arkansas campaign funds of" a powerful politician whose name I shall not mention...
...Teaching the creator of Hamlet and Macbeth from a Marxist-feminist perspective is equivalent to preparing northern Italian cuisine from a Lucrezia Borgian perspective...
...My advice to graduates is get on with it...
...Those students engaged in the study of science and perhaps the more exacting aspects of business and physical education have probably learned some useful stuff...
...For many Americans adulthood does not begin until faraway into middle age, if ever...
...To continue his studies of the bard he will have to take courses taught from a "Marxist-feminist" perspective...
...The Economist seems to believe him, as does London's Sunday Telegraph, which published a similar story...
...Besides there are so many other interesting stories being reported...
...His friend, the powerful politician, pardoned him in 1990...
...Jones was subjected to: (1) false imprisonment, (2) indecent exposure, (3) assault and battery, (4) intimidation, and (5) potential rape...
...So were Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter...
...The Economist has discovered a man whose dealings in the 1980s with the Arkansas investment banking firm of Lasater & Co...
...Recently, in noting to ABC News his disrelish for abortion, he, Hillary's husband—whose name shall not pass my lips here—added the stern qualifiAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Read, write, make money at some productive non-criminal endeavor...
...and the Little Rock political establishment...
...They could go to hell...
...That is how the venerable Economist of London put it in a front-page headline...
...A friend now studying at Columbia has grown particularly interested in Shakespeare...
...College, as envisaged by those who founded higher education here and in Europe, was a place where superior young minds were to gain a foundation in learning that would allow them to think and to lead...
...Reactionary that I am, I do believe that those prefeminist legal conceptions more vividly convey the ordeal that Mrs...
...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is no kid, nor does she jog wearing T-shirts of political or metaphysical significance...
...I shall confirm to the rest what they undoubtedly already know: to wit, they have just wasted four years, perhaps more...
...Moreover, says the paper, "as executive vice-president of the firm, she was in charge of operations, and was viewed by the rest of the staff as the main liaison between Lasater & Co...
...Cultivate your minds and have a fling at what the sourpuss sophisticates call "family values...
...Is it adulthood...
...One of the reasons that I do not want to mention the name of the powerful politician who is married to the aggrieved Hillary is that he is trying very hard to be a good person...
...University endowments, tuitions, and subsidies have never been more opulent...
...Oh yes, and keep life simple...
...Life is rarely as miserable as college...
...Thomasson is director of administration at the White House...
...Departments were opened in studies that had never been studies before and still are not studies, for example Afro-American departments, women's studies departments...
...Up until the recent past this alleged transgression constituted a "morals charge...
...So what will my commencement address amount to when Columbia's grateful university community turns to me for wisdom and uplift...
...Moreover superior minds are lost in the mob of bored mediocrities and faculty zanies who swarm over these campuses...
...Nixon called them "babes," "skirts," and, when in the Southwest, "muchachas...
...cost him his fortune and three attempts on his life, so he says...
...Give them time...
...In Washington about the only notables whom we readily associate with adulthood are Supreme Court justices, who are supposed to be' old and bewhiskered...
...I will say this: There are certainly a lot more scandals surrounding this White House than, say, Gerald Ford's...
...It is all exploitation of a famous figure...
...Anything I might say against a fellow entoiled in such a mighty struggle for the heart and mind of the Almighty could get me in hot water for eternity...
...12 The American Spectator July 1994 The Meaning of Life This that palmy time of year when venerable blowhards are invited to campus to deliver what I believe are called commencement addresses...
...CI 14 The American Spectator July 1994...
...natural growth would have assured more Ph.D.s commensurate with a growing country's needs...
...Quack studies, campus psychiatrists, New Age counselors, and administrators for every sort of problem child...
...Have business schools opened Departments of Sexual Commerce and Breast Feeding...
...Actually, college is obsolete...
...In fact, no member of the Supreme Court has ever been seen running down the street in his undershorts with a baseball cap on...
...Last month the British press was again alive with "More Arkansas Scandals...
...The consequence of all this exploitation of a noble idea is that higher education now has no definition...
...President Eisenhower was hounded by similar charges ceaselessly...
...President Nixon had a whole team of lawyers on the lookout for his "bimbo eruptions...
...Both publications take the man, Dennis Patrick, very seriously...
...Transforming Slippery Rock State College into the University of Slippery Rock with campuses in Bologna and Ulan Bator was nonsense...
...Nor is there anything in the Bible enjoining us to speak ill of this grievously maligned man...
...cation that it is not "self-evident from the Bible that all abortions are murder...
...Among the many questions being examined is whether there were kickbacks" to the political campaigns of a powerful politician and, as to his name, my lips are sealed...
...Both publications say the two men were very friendly, but Dan Lasater, the owner of Lasater & Co., was sentenced to twoand-a-half years in prison for drug distribution...
...And what is the loot spent on...
...It spoils a good thing...
...Jones suffered in a Little Rock hotel at the hands of a powerful politician whose name I shall not even mention in this column...
...Of course, the accursed Nixon never called them bimbos as does Hillary's enlightened friend, Betsey Wright...
...Bombarded as they are with a myriad of exigent entertainments, nights-on-the-town, noble causes, personal-growth therapies, our youth lead more hectic lives than a United States congressman...
...As to what is being commenced, no sensible person can say for sure...
...I, as a sedulous student of her husband's theological observations, see precisely what she means...
...Massaging the citizenry's almost superstitious belief in the benignity ofeducation, these wheeler-dealers cadged billions from state treasuries and from wealthy benefactors to transform many fine colleges into useless universities...
...I visited Columbia University the other day and thought I was in a slum...
...Yet now that the feminists have clothed all contact between the sexes with what is best described as generalized neurosis we, perforce, apply the overworked term "sexual harassment" to allegations that Mrs...
...T his month I vow not to write one word of disparagement against the man whom Paula Corbin Jones has accused of what we moderns call "sexual harassment...
...If they are typical Americans they have many years of youth ahead of them...
...Think of our president, his simpering wife, many members of Congress—all are eternal kids...
...The country already had plenty of graduate students coming from established universities...
...Graduates leave universities wondering what history, literature, and philosophy are all about...
...Unfortunately, sometime after the Second World War, growing numbers of colleges came under the control of empire-builders...
...Yet I shall reassure them that learning is not nearly so tedious as their profs have made it and that youth need not be as harrowing...
...They are very depressing places for those who admire learning and robust, uninhibited thought...
...Legitimate profs and serious students get short shrift...
Vol. 27 • July 1994 • No. 7
